Chalice desecrated by ISIS.
Credit: Diocese of Malaga, Spain. Argentine bishop warns priests to distribute Holy Communion in the hand
The Bishop of San Rafael, Argentina, warned last week that he will impose canonical sanctions on priests who distribute Communion on the tongue during the coronavirus pandemic, in defiance of a diocesan directive permitting the distribution of Communion only in the hand.
Bishop Eduardo Taussig announced on June 13 that the Eucharist in his diocese was to be distributed only in the hand, until the pandemic concluded.
A number of priests in the diocese continued to distribute the Eucharist on the tongue after Bishop Taussig’s decree was issued.
In his August 20 message, Bishop Taussig warned that those who had acted with “disobedience have caused scandal and division”.
He said his message constituted a formal canonical warning that any priest who continued to disobey his directive would face canonical sanctions.
Polish bishops: respect all people, but don’t accept LGBT+ views uncritically
Catholics have a duty to respect people who identify as LGBT+ but are not obliged to accept their views uncritically, Poland’s bishops said. The bishops made that comment in a 27-page document released on August 28, which condemned verbal and physical violence against people associated with the LGBT+ movement.
“The obligation to respect people connected with the LGBT+ movement does not mean to accept their views uncritically. On the contrary, it means analysing them carefully and considering them in the light of the objective truth about human sexuality and the principles of the common good,” the bishops said.
The text is the bishops’ contribution to a raging debate about LGBT+ rights in Poland. The issue featured prominently in the run-up to July’s presidential election, narrowly won by the incumbent Andrzej Duda.
Italian bishops’ newspaper faces pushback after letter supports abortion law
The newspaper of the Italian bishops’ conference is facing criticism after it published a letter on Wednesday of last week arguing that Catholics can support legal abortion in the country.
In a “letter to the director” of Avvenire, Angelo Moretti, coordinator of Caritas in the Diocese of Benevento, wrote that “to terminate an embryo is to terminate a life” and “continuing to argue that an embryo is not a life is really an ideological residue that should fail in honest intellectual debates”.
“But Law 194 is not an anti-life law and can be accepted by Catholics,” he added.
Commentators in Italy criticized Avvenire’s decision to publish the letter.
“Abortion remains a crimen nefandum. And no law can ever make an abominable crime just,” the lawyer Gianfranco Amato wrote.
Chalice shot at by ISIS militants to be displayed in Spanish churches
As part of an effort to remember and pray for persecuted Christians, several churches in the Diocese of Málaga, Spain are displaying a chalice that was shot by the Islamic State.
The chalice was rescued from a Syrian Catholic church in the town of Qaraqosh on the Nineveh plain in Iraq. It was brought to the Málaga diocese by the papal charity Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) to be displayed during Masses offered for persecuted Christians. “This chalice was used by the jihadists for target practice,” explained Ana María Aldea, an ACN delegate in Málaga. “What they did not imagine is that it would be re-consecrated and taken to many parts of the world to hold Mass in its presence.”